Blogs

The finalists for the 2011 Aurora Awards have been announced, and my collection Chimerascope is on the ballot, under the category, "Best English Related Work." The full ballot is shown below. Congratulations and best of luck to all the finalists. PROFESSIONAL AWARDSBest English NovelBlack Bottle Man by Craig Russell, Great Plains Publications Destiny's Blood by Marie Bilodeau, Dragon Moon Press Stealing Home by Hayden Trenholm, Bundoran Press Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking Canada Watch by Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada Best English Short Story "The Burden of Fire" by Hayden Trenholm, Neo-Opsis #19 "Destiny Lives in the Tattoo's Needle" by Suzanne Church, Tesseracts Fourteen, EDGE "The Envoy" by Al Onia, Warrior Wisewoman 3, Norilana Books "Touch the Sky, They Say" by Matt Moore, AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, November "Your Beating Heart" by M. G. Gillett, Rigor Amortis, Absolute Xpress Best English Related WorkChimerascope, Douglas Smith (collection), ChiZine Publications The Dragon and the Stars, edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, DAW Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick, EDGE On Spec, edited by Diane Walton, Copper Pig Writers Society Tesseracts Fourteen, edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, EDGE

Michael Baron Craze at the Rogue Cinema site recently blogged about last fall's Terror Film Festival in Philadelphia and included a review of "By Her Hand, She Draws You Down". Here's an extract from his review: "This film comes from author Douglas Smith’s story of the same name and breathes in Anthony Sumner’s screenplay, transforming into a new variation on the vampire genre. Anthony’s creation contains an incredible haunting feeling, [that] escapes the screen like a hypnotic trance, assisted from Gene Hodsdon eerie music and filming in November at the desolate beachside locations in the historic New Jersey shore. … [A] tale of love, commitment and survival." You can read Michael's full blog post on the film festival and the full review of "By Her Hand..." here.

Writer Heidi Ruby Miller recently invited me to take part in her recurring "Pick Six" interview series on her blog. Heidi has a fun and unusual approach to these interviews (which is not surprising, since Heidi's background also seems fun and unusual, including a stint at archaelogy, working at both a Frank Lloyd Wright house and Disney World, and an appearance on Who Wants to be a Millionaire). Anyway, for the Pick Six interviews, she gives the author a list of 15 questions and asks them to pick any six to answer. Here was my list: 1. Which of your characters is your favorite? 2. Tell me about your travels. 3. Coffee, tea, or milk? 4. What else can you do besides write? 5. Who are you reading right now? 6. Pop culture or academia? 7. What is the toughest scene you ever wrote? 8. Where do you find your inspirations to write? 9. Food you could eat everyday. 10. Are you into sports or other physical activities? 11. What kind of music speaks to you? 12. Do you outline your stories or do they just take you along for the ride? 13. Celebrity crush. 14. Who are the biggest influences on your work? 15. Do you still watch cartoons? Can you guess which ones I went for? You can check out the entire interview below or on Heidi's site. Here's the full interview:

Claire Horsnell at Blood and Vegetables ("Horror lit with a side of vegetables") recently interviewed me about my Springsteen stories, small presses in general and ChiZine publication in particular, the By Her Hand movie, Chimerascope and the CBC bookies, and other writing projects. The text of her interview is below.

Although author Douglas Smith is adamant that his own stories aren’t written with political motives, the tales in his first collection, Chimerascope, frequently envision a future of corporate totalitarianism, in which everyday people are at the mercy of forces they can’t control and are faced with the prospect of sacrifice and compromise in order to survive. It’s a theme that also runs through the work of one of Smith’s inspirations, Bruce Springsteen—and Smith has written a number of stories with titles inspired by Springsteen’s work.

“Springsteen is an astounding storyteller,” says Smith. “His strongest songs are ballads, stories told through real characters, everyday people struggling with whatever life has thrown at them. And there is generally such an attitude of defiance and hope despite the odds against them. So many of his songs just speak to me of the bigger stories behind the ones that he just gets to hint at in just a few lines.”

Blogger and book reviewer Terry Grignon has posted a nice review of my collection, Chimerascope. Here are a few extracts:

"I enjoyed Smith’s characterization the most. These personas fly off the page and into your head and force you to think their thoughts. And that’s just about the best that fiction can aspire to. ... The evidence for Smith’s talent is in abundance through this entire book. There wasn’t one story I didn’t like, even the horror genre pieces which I’m normally not into. They’re all so different, even the ones set in the same universe, that it’s hard to believe they came from the same person. Very highly recommended."

Well, sort of. The indie movie based on my story "By Her Hand, She Draws You Down" has finished its North American festival tour, but is now starting to show up on the list of official entries in some international festivals, including:

SFF-rated ATHENS 2011, Mikrokosmos Film Center, Athens, Greece, March 10-16, will screen short films and features from 23 countries

My second collection, Chimerascope, has made a Top 50 list of the best SF&F books in 2010. Warm and fuzzy feelings from being on a list with the likes of one of my short fiction gods, Ted Chiang, and names like Rob Sawyer, Larry Niven, Jack Vance, and many other writers with whom I never expected to be listed. As far as I can tell, this list appears to be compiled based on the various reviews that all of these books received, so thanks to all of the reviewers who were kind to Chimerascope! And this is probably a good time to remind you to keep Chimerascope in mind when nominating for the 2011 Aurora Awards!

I just resold "Spirit Dance," the first story I ever wrote and first I ever sold, to the upcoming anthology, The Beast Within #2. This is the 30th sale for this tale of shape-shifters, love, shadowy government agencies, and the environment. "Spirit Dance" is included in my collection, Impossibilia. You can read an excerpt here and reviews here. Here's the cover from its original appearance in the Canadian anthology series, Tesseracts. This story started my fiction career, and it's great to know that the tale still has legs (especially since my first novel, "Spirit Dreams," is based on the characters from "Spirit Dance.")